Three: Maximum Entropy

For starters, they tore the entire roof off. Early in the process we found a low-wage, jack-sneakered thug standing on top of our refrigerator, beating upwards on the roof with a 10- pound sledge hammer.

That's Tom, cool, clean, and in-command, at lower right.

An, um, unique view of our kitchen counter.

About the time the last of the roof came off, it began to rain. We were holed up in the upstairs of the barn, but we both remember lying awake at night with rain drumming steadily on the metal roof over our heads. Tom had covered the roof with blue plastic tarps, but the water just pooled in between the temporary rafters. Unable to sleep one rainy night, we got our flashlights and went down to the house. A huge blue udder, perhaps 4 feet deep, hung directly over the kitchen sink. There wasn't much we could do. By morning, it had burst.

Tom did an incredible job of framing in the odd angles and difficult structural details of the second floor. To cut costs we had agreed to take on the framing of the roof over the living room ourselves. The walls of the original camp were so shabbily built that we figured we might as well replace them with all-new framing where possible, so our living room was eventually stripped down to a floor and two walls. We hired our friend George Stone to help with this and endless other details, including installing windows and replacing the shallow piers with new ones.

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